Edge of Vision

Many of you have probably seen this animation of a spinning dancer silhouette from the Daily Telegraph, as it’s been making the rounds on various blogs and social networking sites. It’s a neat animation, but the blurb also states the following:

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test … do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise? If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Personally, I can’t think of anything that would back up their source-less assertion, and a quick literature search doesn’t turn up anything either. I’ve chalked it up as a yet another misinformative popular-press write-up, but was wondering if any readers had further insight.

There’s a rather neat video from the Today Show featuring blind climber Erik Weihenmayer and a researcher, discussing BrainPort, a system which takes visual input from a camera and outputs as an array of tongue stimulation. Erik demonstrates recognizing some written numerals, while a video display gives an idea of what information is being output to his tongue. The tech seems nearly ready for market already, and I’m sure it’ll eventually become more portable.

A quick YouTube search brought up the following video from a few months ago from CBS News, which shows a blind tester walking around using the system and has some spiffy graphics which show how the system works: